POLITICAL LANGUAGE!

'Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.' --George Orwell.

MORE THAN HALF EMPTY IS NOT HALF FULL

John Key said in his victory speech that 'nearly half New Zealanders voted for National.' That is a falsehood. First, the voter-turnout was an abysmal low--only 68.8%, reported to be the lowest turnout since the 1880s. National won only 47.99% of that on the day, and if the specials continue the downward drift we saw as counting went on during the night it will end up with even less. Mr Key needs to get his thinking aligned to the truth.

If he thinks on those numbers that he has a mandate to do even more damage to New Zealand's energy assets than National did before Helen Clark's long reign he is deluding himself even more.

47.99 of 68.8% is only 33% of the voting population. Against him, in the vote, is 52.01% of 68.8%, which is 38.8%. He has no mandate. A mandate is a majority. He does not have one. To say he does is a blatant lie.

Or to look at the election result a different way, National got 60 seats out of 121. When you add its crutches, ACT and United Future, it has 62 seats. Therefore 59 seats are against it. Not a thumping vote of confidence.

On top of that is the fact that 31.2% of the population did not vote at all--not far off the 33% won over by his party. The Did Not Vote Party has almost as much support as National. National's 33% may drift down; the 31.2% is set in concrete. The Did Not Vote may end up winning the election. December the 10th will tell us that.

Anais Nin put it perfectly: 'We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.' Key is seeing what he is, and in saying what he sees he is telling us what he is.

As the generation of energy becomes ever more important we must not have any impediment between us and 100% democratic control. Deluded, dishonest reasoning should not be allowed to create the huge impediment of selling 49% of our generation. The people must own their power. National has already messed up the energy sector quite enough with all the hocking off led by Max Bradford years ago. Now it thinks it has a mandate to trash it even more. It does not. It is lying to itself and us.

NO MMP COAT-TAILS

We need to make two changes to MMP to get the corruption out of it.

First, as this blog has already said, if you got the threshold in the previous election you must stand a candidate in every seat. You may not drop an electorate to do a deal with some splinter Party to get advantage for your party and it.

Second, any party that does not get to the MMP threshold but also wins one of more electorate seats should get no more than that/those seats, not the percentage of seats represented by its under-threshold party-vote.You do not get the under-threshold percentage of seats.

That will eliminate the corrupt trick so beloved by the National Party of letting an under-threshold party ride in on the coat-tails of a lone ranger, then the lone rangers' party exaggerates the big party's coalition.

ADVANCE VOTING CORRUPTS THE POLL

National wanted as much of the vote as possible, and knew that from the polls that it had nowhere to go but down, so it corrupted the game and allowed people to vote in advance of polling day for any reason that suited their convenience. A quarter of a million played the game outside the field before the fixture-date. They voted before the campaign was over, before all the policy announcements had been made, and thus before everyone had all the information needed to make an informed decision. That is grossly unfair. And stupid.

Voting in advance should be allowed only for an extremely good reason, as used to be the case, not just to fit people's lifestyles, their notions of convenience, or whatever pops into their heads. Anything to the contrary is not a free and fair election. It is corruption.

If you cannot find a bit of time to vote during the ten hours of polling day you miss out. Period.

The advance voting in this election was not the same as the result on the night. National dropped about 2%, from 49.81% to 47.99% and Labour came up a bit from 26.30% to 27.13, so there was a 2.65% movement between the two main parties between the advance vote and the election-day vote. That is no trifle. In a 120-seat Parliament it is 3 seats. National might have only 57 seats, not 60, and even with ACT and United Future would have only 59--not a majority.

National's advance-voting trick worked. It got a significant advantage from it.

.........

The point is underlined by the numbers of seats in the advance and voting-night votes:
The seat-count in the advance votes was:   62(N), 32(L), 12(G), 9(NZF), 3(Ma), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)
In the voting-day votes the seat-count was: 60(N), 34(L), 13(G), 8(NZF), 3(M), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)

..........

The final count, released on the 10th of December, shows even more graphically how well the trick worked:
                                                                  59(N), 34(L), 14(G), 8(NZF), 3(M), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)

Obviously, if the playing-field had been level, and everyone had been voting at the same time, the result would have been different. National dropped from 49.81% to 47.31%. Labour went up from 26.30% to 27.48%. So there was in the end a 3.68% change in the difference between the two main parties from the advance votes to election-day votes (the difference between them went down from 23.51% to 19.83%).

Cheating paid off. A lot more subtle than stuffing the ballot-boxes like they did in Russia, and made to look very legal. But cheating. Corruption. Manipulation for your own advantage.

GUTLESS MEDIA

So the Prime Minister, John Key, sets up a conversation over a cup of tea with his ACT Party stooge, John Banks, in Epsom. The media are invited, and turn up in droves.

But when a part of the conversation is inadvertently recorded that John Key decides he does not want the public of New Zealand to know he called the police and claims that the two Johns were bugged--recorded without their knowledge.

The gutless media did not publish the conversation recorded on the so-called Teacup Tape 'for ethical reasons', despite the fact that the people of New Zealand have an absolute right to know as much as possible about those who govern them. Key has no right to prevent that. The media have even less right.

Then the High Court ruled that it could not decide if the conversation was private or not! Please!

But even given that open door the gutless media did not publish.

It is an unwritten rule in the media, a time-honoured and very correct tradition that if you invite the media everything is on the record unless you specifically say of some part of the proceedings, 'That's off the record.' That was never said, so that whole setup was on the record.

Please, gutless media, publish the lot before we vote tomorrow. We want to know who is going to be running the country, warts and all. Otherwise all we have is the spin.

DEAF MPs AND GERRYMANDERING

It afflicts all those who should have chosen a different career. <a href="http://andrew.avowkind.net/nikki-kaye-and-the-no-reply-zone">This blog article records one example</a> and points to others of the same ilk--as it happens from the same party.

The disease may be worse in particular parties, but it is at heart an individual's affliction.

Parties who are so high in the polls that they think election victory is a sure thing obviously do not need to listen to anyone or bother to reply to anyone.

Advice given me decades ago by a Wellington painter should always be heeded: 'It's not the first job you want from a customer, or the second. It's the third, because then you've got him for life.'

Those who fail to listen and, even worse, fail to respond, will not get the second job (or vote if they are MPs).

The gerrymandering the blogger refers to was, and remains, a nasty example of the lies people will tell themselves in their lust for territory. Auckland has long lusted after the islands of the Hauraki Gulf. It first tried to take over Waiheke Island in 1947. Finally, in the local government 'reforms' of 1986 it got it--it got all the islands. Including Great Barrier. The national electorate boundaries did the same. So now we on the islands are compelled to live in the rort in which islands 20-90 kilometres away from Auckland's Central Business District are classified as part of it. What sane or honest person would claim islands far out to sea, even up to 90km away, are part of a central city? As the old Roman saying neatly puts it: 'When men cannot change things they change words.' Bluntly, they lie to get what they want.

The lies of that gerrymandering are made even more blatant by the fact that the political parties that did it and supported it also passed and supported the formation of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, which contains the Gulf and the Coromandel Peninsular. The Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act established it. But political lusts kneecapped it.

The Local Government Commission, which is meant to be independent of the government, went along and assisted with that chronic rort by refusing with a stream of weasel-words and defiance of the Local Government Act to put the islands with the peninsular. Two members of the three-person Commission that made the decision were Aucklanders. Should we be surprised?

The corrupt do not see things as they are. They see things as THEY are. They act on their corruption not on reality.